Moy Sand and Gravel

Moy Sand and Gravel PDF

Author: Paul Muldoon

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2014-09-02

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 1466879807

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Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age. Moy Sand and Gravel is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Howdie-Skelp

Howdie-Skelp PDF

Author: Paul Muldoon

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0374602964

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The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection. A “howdie-skelp” is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It’s a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon’s new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an “affront” to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.

Frolic and Detour

Frolic and Detour PDF

Author: Paul Muldoon

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2019-11-19

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0374721432

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A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Though Frolic and Detour is Paul Muldoon’s thirteenth collection, it shows all the energy and ambition we might generally associate with a first book. Here, the poet brings his characteristic humor and humanity to the chickadee, the house wren, the deaths of Leonard Cohen and C. K. Williams, the Irish Rising, the Great War, and how “a streak of ragwort / may yet shine / as an off-the-record / remark becomes the party line.” Frolic and Detour reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling, and shows us why Paul Muldoon was described by Nick Laird, writing in The New York Review of Books, as “the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, [who] writes poems like no one else.”

Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry

Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry PDF

Author: Ruben Moi

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-01-13

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 9004355111

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Paul Muldoon and the Language of Poetry is the first book in years that attends to the entire oeuvre of the Irish-American poet, critic, lyricist, dramatist and Princeton professor from his debut with New Weather in 1973 up to his very recent publications. Ruben Moi’s book explores, in correspondence with language philosophy and critical debate, how Muldoon’s ingenious language and inventive form give shape and significance to his poetry, and how his linguistic panache and technical verve keep language forever surprising, new and alive.

The End of the Poem

The End of the Poem PDF

Author: Paul Muldoon

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-08-21

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1429923911

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In The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon, "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" (The Times Literary Supplement), presents engaging, rigorous, and insightful explorations of a diverse group of poems, from Yeats's "All Souls' Night" to Stevie Smith's "I Remember" to Fernando Pessoa's "Autopsychography." Here Muldoon reminds us that the word "poem" comes, via French, from the Latin and Greek: "a thing made or created." He asks: Can a poem ever be a freestanding, discrete structure, or must it always interface with the whole of its author's bibliography—and biography? Muldoon explores the boundlessness, the illimitability, created by influence, what Robert Frost meant when he insisted that "the way to read a poem in prose or verse is in the light of all the other poems ever written." And he writes of the boundaries or borders between writer and reader and the extent to which one determines the role of the other. At the end, Muldoon returns to the most fruitful, and fraught, aspect of the phrase "the end of the poem": the interpretation that centers on the "aim" or "function" of a poem, and the question of whether or not the end of the poem is the beginning of criticism. Irreverent, deeply learned, often funny, and always stimulating, The End of the Poem is a vigorous and accessible approach to looking at poetry anew.

Ireland and Transatlantic Poetics

Ireland and Transatlantic Poetics PDF

Author: Brian Caraher

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780874139723

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"Transatlantic poetics" is the principal theme and the constructive burden of these essays. The motive toward its articulation lies in the demand for cross-national, international, and post-nationalist comprehension of cultural relations and critical practices across modern Anglophone British, Irish, and North American literary developments, literary filiations, and literary history. Anglophone literary study needs to articulate ever more clearly the poetics of literary practices, including the cultural politics of literary histories and literary reading. Ireland is a small island, yet its finest writers have insistently articulated its modern culture within a transatlantic neighborhood stretching from continental Europe across the British and Irish archipelago to the western reaches of North America. Modern Dublin is a cultural location for constructing transatlantic literary relations and poetics. This collection foregrounds modern Dublin, its writers, its universities, its literary journals, its teachers, and critics of English Studies, as well as the contested critical construction of regional and international poetics and cultural politics that emerges from the often tense interaction of local and global literary practices and critical desires.

One Thousand Things Worth Knowing

One Thousand Things Worth Knowing PDF

Author: Paul Muldoon

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2015-01-13

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 0374713642

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Another wild, expansive collection from the eternally surprising Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Smuggling diesel; Ben-Hur (the movie, yes, but also Lew Wallace's original book, and Seosamh Mac Grianna's Gaelic translation); a real trip to Havana; an imaginary trip to the Château d'If: Paul Muldoon's newest collection of poems, his twelfth, is exceptionally wide-ranging in its subject matter—as we've come to expect from this master of self-reinvention. He can be somber or quick-witted—often within the same poem: The mournful refrain of "Cuthbert and the Otters" is "I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead," but that doesn't stop Muldoon from quipping that the ancient Danes "are already dyeing everything beige / In anticipation, perhaps, of the carpet and mustard factories." If this masterful, multifarious collection does have a theme, it is watchfulness. "War is to wealth as performance is to appraisal," he warns in "Recalculating." And "Source is to leak as Ireland is to debt." Heedful, hard-won, head-turning, heartfelt, these poems attempt to bring scrutiny to bear on everything, including scrutiny itself. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing confirms Nick Laird's assessment, in The New York Review of Books, that Muldoon is "the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets," an experimenter and craftsman who "writes poems like no one else."

Maggot

Maggot PDF

Author: Paul Muldoon

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2010-10-07

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 0571269648

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In his eleventh full-length collection, Paul Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are 'sex and the dead', Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its 'subject' the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal car accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title-sequence but many of the round-songs that characterize Maggot and has led Angela Leighton, writing in the TLS, to see these new poems (on their earlier appearance in Plan B, an interim volume which included several of the poems in Maggot) as giving readers 'a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish.'

Quoof

Quoof PDF

Author: Paul Muldoon

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2010-12-09

Total Pages: 75

ISBN-13: 0571263828

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'These poems delight in a wily, mischievous, nonchalant negotiation between the affections and attachments of Muldoon's own childhood, family and place, and the ironic discriminations of a cool literary sensibility and historical awareness.' Times Literary Supplement